Here's how it worked: To apply for a position at Bellagio, you set up an appointment at the 65,000-square-foot administrative complex that we built on land adjacent to the Mirage. When you drove into the parking lot, an HR staff person wearing a microphone -- just like the Secret Service -- confirmed your identity and notified staff at the door, who greeted you by name and assigned you to a computer terminal that also knew your name. Suddenly, you were thinking, Wow, this is pretty cool.
When you have more than 80,000 job applicants, probably 20% to 30% of them are just kicking tires; they're only casually interested in the opportunity. But I'm serious about them, because I need to hire 9,600 people. My job is to treat these folks as if they are guests at Bellagio: I want to impress the hell out of them and convert them from casually interested to very interested. So we took the same personalized-service principles we use for our guests and applied them to our applicants.
There were candidates filling out applications on 100 computer terminals at all times -- 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Once you completed the application, the computer would thank you and ask you to proceed to a checkout desk. And our staffers literally checked you out. Ostensibly, they would review your application for completeness. But what they were really doing was assessing your communication skills and your overall demeanor. At that point, we weeded out about 20% of the applicants.
Next came the interviews -- all 27,000 of them. Since we built a Web-based database that operates with a browser, a hiring manager could sit at her office PC and call up, say, the highest-rated food servers in our pool of candidates. The system would retrieve the applications that met her standards and display them in ranking order. She would then pick three candidates to interview for every opening.
Every day, 180 hiring managers conducted 740 interviews. We instructed the managers for a week on how to use the online system and how to complete the interview in 30 minutes. Letting an interview drift even to 40 minutes would have sent us into a tailspin. We had to do all of the interviews in 10 weeks. We didn't have any more time. So we trained our managers, we made sure that they were ready, and then we hit the bell and took off.
For the interviews, hiring managers asked a set of questions that we had developed for this process. They were behavioral questions, like "Tell me about a time when you were working at the front desk, and a guest was late. What did you do when you couldn't find the reservation?" Managers had a PC embedded in their desk tops, so the computers were unobtrusive, and the monitors displayed a rating sheet. Candidates were scored based on their answers, which were again ranked in numerical order and fed into the database. We had to use a formal system: If we had left it up to 180 managers to follow their own formats, we'd still be interviewing candidates today.
If a manager wanted to hire you, he would call up your file and click on "conduct a background check." I had 18 law-enforcement officials looking into candidates' backgrounds. They'd get your application online and then check your employment, military, and education history to make sure that everything was okay. We rejected about 8% of our candidates at this stage for various reasons, such as lying on their applications.
If you passed the background check and a drug test, the manager would then make the final hiring decision. If he clicked "yes" on your form, one of our HR staffers would invite you to a job-offer meeting. So again, we had to process 100 people an hour on their tax status, number of dependents -- all of that personnel stuff. Actually, we processed about 800 people a day for 12 days.
When you hire somebody, you create three files: a personnel file, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data file, and a medical file. Since we had developed all of this electronic-filing technology for our job applications, we thought, Why not have an electronic personnel file? We could eliminate three paper files for each of the 9,600 people -- that's 28,800 separate files. In the process, we would also get rid of the files that managers usually keep at their desks. So we developed this electronic personnel file and transmitted everything from the application database to the new-hire database.
We created the same technology for all of our personnel and payroll forms, so managers can now fill out those forms online. Once again, we took ourselves completely out of the transaction. We didn't have to collect, input, and file thousands upon thousands of paper forms. That's why I get to take a three-week summer vacation in the Adirondacks every year.
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
